CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

INTO THE ABYSS

“OH, MY GAWD.” Numbness claimed my entire arm. I sat and watched my limb shake. Energy thrilled throughout it, pushing pins and needles every which way until, finally, I could slightly feel again. Not pleasantly. I flexed my digits. They moved stiffly, with an ache and a buzz, as though I had suddenly become partially paralyzed. I rolled my arm about, the strange feeling of its not being quite mine flowing all the way up to the shoulder. What energy he’d had left, he’d expended to get the stone to take him, and it had.

The knowledge that I’d lost him, truly lost him, flooded me. Hot tears began sliding down my cheek. “What did you do? Why?” I shook all over, my arm tingling as circulation fought to return. “We had the key, finally. Why did you quit on me?” Then I gathered myself, not to stand but to try to hold myself together, crouched there on the cellar floor. “We’re so close! I needed you to hold on. To give me a chance. To believe in me. And you have to go and quit on me.”

I tried to scrub my cheeks dry. Words kept tumbling out, even though I knew I talked to someone who was no longer there, not in any way. “What am I going to tell Mom? How am I going to tell her I failed?”

I didn’t know if I had the sheer guts needed to go after Nicolo now without freeing my father as a motivation. I had no idea if I could do it, even with my friends helping. How could I ask them to sacrifice everything when our goal had vanished? I cradled my face a moment.

“The professor came back. We had the odds, a genuine hope, to get you out of this. Why didn’t you believe me?” I had to wipe my nose on my sleeve. Let out a string of cuss words that would have curled both my parents’ hair if they’d heard me. What you can learn on a field hockey team, right?

Not that it helped any except to get my breathing down to normal again. I heaved one last sigh. Gone. I’d lost him. My nose stung and my eyes burned and I knew I’d cried ugly and would again when I tried to tell Mom what had happened.

“What am I going to do?” Things had gone incredibly dark. I wiped at my eyes again.

“Tessa. Listen to me.”

Words flooded my mind, and it was him, strong and bold and doing the fatherly bit. Tears welled up once more.

I swiveled my head about. Maybe there was hope after all. “It didn’t work? It didn’t take you? Where are you? I can’t See you!”

“In the stone.”

He wasn’t gone, but he wasn’t free, either. “How do I . . . what can I do about that? Damn stone does what it wants to. I don’t know if I can make it release you.”

“I’m where I need to be and you can listen.”

I stood up, went over to the bottom step, and sat back down. “All right.” I hiccoughed faintly. “Because if you did this on purpose, you’d better have some idea of how all this is going to turn out!”

“Something of an idea.”

“It had better be a blockbuster.”

And my father began to tell me the tale of how he got himself into this fix.

I listened, tamping down my reactions, aware outside myself that it was like listening to an AA meeting. This was how I got trapped. This was how I fell . . . and fell . . . and finally reached bottom. It hurt to hear him tell me things I had never known for certain but that my mother and I had guessed as we lost our credit cards, our home, our bank accounts.

Flexing my left hand in and out, trying to force away the feeling that it wasn’t entirely in my control, I sat as quietly as I could manage. The professor would have been impressed. I chewed on a corner of my lower lip to keep myself still. Certainly, my father had to feel my thoughts tumbling about him, angry and definitely conflicted, but I didn’t speak them aloud. I listened as we went down the rabbit hole, literally, to the bet that would settle all other bets . . . if he won.

I straightened at that. We’d finally hit pay dirt in his confession, and he stopped talking.

“Take note,” he said.

“Oh, I am. This is the Master who made the offer, right.”

“None other.”

“So Mortimer guessed correctly about your downfall.”

“Somewhat. I was hooked, no doubt about that, and I won enough to make my heart race, and to pay off Aunt April’s debts and everything seemed exhilarating. I couldn’t lose! Then everything went cold. If it weren’t for bad luck, I had none at all. I tapped out, bankrupted every source I could touch. Nothing worked. Then I was offered a deal. Poker game, high stakes, and if I won and delivered, everything would be wiped out and I’d be funded again.” My father’s voice lowered. “My opponent had an idea he had something valuable, a relic, but had no real idea what it was. He had just enough talent to perceive a bit of its power. He played for money, and I cleaned him out until he finally put that stone up in the last stake.”

I blinked. “The maelstrom stone?”

“Yes. The Master wanted it although he had no idea of its worth either, but he needed to study it. I would retrieve it and turn it over to him.”

“So you won it.”

“I did.”

“Did it embed in you?”

“No. But I felt it keenly. For the first time in years, I knew clearly what was right and what was wrong, and that I shouldn’t keep my end of the bargain. Knew it better than I knew my own name. It became clear to me that the fellow who’d lost to me would come after me as well as the Master. I’d frittered away the two of you and my home, but I remembered this old place of Aunt April’s, empty and unused. I came and went through the cellar window. It was a nice hidey hole while it lasted.”

“It didn’t last, though, did it?”

“Not quite.”

“Who was the loser?”

“At the poker game? Fellow by the name of Parker. A Judge Parker.”

“Oh, shit, Dad. He’s a real piece of work.”

Well, that explained what happened to Goldie and his animosity toward me. I knew he’d abducted and held her at one time before I decided her missing along with the Eye of Nimora was more than coincidence. He’d hated me at first sight when I crossed him. Parker had to have had Nicolo all over him for not giving up the stone when asked and then losing it—not to mention stealing the Eye without knowing its true function and trying to auction it off elsewhere. Parker would have been desperate to make amends. “I know him,” I said. “The Society has him under wraps, for now.”

“He is, unless I miss my guess, dead and gone. The Master has little patience.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I can cross him off the list of uglies we might meet, then.”

“Most likely. I doubt the Master would have lifted a finger to keep him around.”

“So what happened? I found the stone in the old cabinet down here, wedged into a locked drawer. Shed some blood on it by accident and BOOM—it buried itself in my palm and that was that.”

“It chose you, for whatever reasons it had. It is, in its way, sentient. Magical, in any way you might want to describe it. Parker had to have been lacking in talent to not be able to recognize its potential. I saw it the moment he put it out on the poker table. It burned right through me. A blood bond . . . well, in your way, you invited it, and it answered. It won’t leave you easily.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve had people try to kill me for it.”

“And that’s what we face now. It took a while for the Master to learn I had no intentions of relinquishing the stone. He came here looking for it. I did the only thing I could do. I hid.”

I thought of the way I had hidden that night not that long ago, when I felt thinned out and all but invisible, the maelstrom stone pulling me into transparency. “You stretched out.”

“I did. And kept doing it, praying he wouldn’t be able to sense me or grab a hold of me. I’d already hidden the stone, but even though it hadn’t claimed me, we had a connection. It pulled and pulled on me until I had almost nothing left.”

I knew the feeling, terrifying and yet the only thing that could have saved me at the time. I remembered thinking then how, in some ways, it paralleled my father’s existence. “I know,” I told him.

“Show me.”

I didn’t want to but reeled out my memories of that horrible night and the thing that had pursued me, and how close I came to losing myself altogether. A long silence followed. I don’t know if my father could tire in his current realm of existence or what had happened.

Finally he sighed. “I would have warned you if I could have.”

“About using the stone? Or the Butchery?”

“All of it. You have this life outside the house, and I had only this life within it. I couldn’t begin to guess what you were up against.”

“And if you had known, did you have the training or ability to teach me?”

Another pause. Then, reluctantly, “Probably not. We had some minor talent. Hedge witches, they would have called Polly and Aunt April. Myself? A minor magician, at the most. I had some telekinesis, that’s why I excelled at golf, though I didn’t know why then. And luck. I had good fortune until it turned on me. I knew games of chance, and the odds, and how to push the odds in my favor, but the adrenaline betrayed me. The Master amplified my telekinesis for that last gambling bout. He made a sort of mage out of me.”

“And the price.”

“Price?”

“For every action, there is a price. Magic demands its price. You knew that, right?”

“Not precisely.”

“Well, trust me, I do. The stone feeds on my essence and if I overuse it, I drop. There are other spells that take their toll as well. The professor has shown me that it is a law of the universe, and we have to be very careful what we do.”

“Are you?”

“I try.”

“So now we go to face the Master.”

I stood up on the cellar stairs, my ass beginning to feel the chill and unrelenting hardness of the step. “I go, but not alone.”

“It’s my fight, too.”

“You’re the reason I’m going!”

“Not entirely,” my father said. “You have that streak of responsibility I never had. You want to see the Butchery dismantled and those souls freed.”

He was right. I’m no hero, but I’m not going to turn my back on a soul in pain if I can help. And, I intended to leave the Master without the ability to hunt anyone ever again. “You’ve got me there.”

“And you’ve got me here. You need to get me as close to the Master as you dare.”

A lump filled my throat and made it difficult to swallow for a moment. “I have to?”

“You do. The maelstrom stone carries me, and you carry the stone.”

“He’s a vampire.”

“I know. But none of you can wound him if you can’t break the cocoon of wards and spells he has wrapped about himself, going back forever. It’s armor for him and it’s been very effective.”

“And you think you can?”

My father answered, “You’d better hope I can if the rest of you want any chance at all of surviving the encounter.”

“You think your hedge witchiness is a match?”

“I think that if anyone can put a crack into his wall, I can. I intend to be a crowbar. Once there’s a crack, he’s vulnerable. It’ll be up to the rest of you to pry it wide open.”

I wanted to believe he could do it. I needed to. But I couldn’t, not quite. There was no way I couldn’t take him; the stone had him, and where I went, the stone went. No possibility of leaving him behind.

But I couldn’t depend on him.

Not from years ago . . . and not now. I said nothing. I don’t know if he could read my thoughts.

I hoped not.